


Again, in Spring

by grayglube



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: AU, F/M, Jon is the groundskeeper on the Stark property, Modern, Prompt Fill
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-03
Updated: 2016-10-03
Packaged: 2018-08-19 07:09:56
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,734
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8195389
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/grayglube/pseuds/grayglube
Summary: He can watch if he likes, she likes to be looked at. She’s not so ashamed of being vain that she’ll lie to herself.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the tumblr prompt: Jon gets a job working for Ned Stark in which he gets to live on the grounds. When his daughter Sansa returns home she is intrigued by the new groundskeeper but has to be careful that her father doesn't find out.
> 
> I played with the prompt and kinda got there. This is as close to fluff as I get and there is still a megaton of angst in here.

It’s not something pleasant that brings her attention to him, it’s grim and morbid and she’s only really properly says ‘hello’ for the first time, two months after he’s taken over for his increasingly dotty grandfather as groundkeeper for the vacation house, while he’s digging a grave for her dog.

 

She’s not entirely ready to endure a long conversation when her pet is mounded up in old floral sheets that don’t fit any of the beds next to her under the big tree that’s the oldest thing on the land.

 

It isn’t that she doesn’t talk to the help, it’s just that she doesn’t quite notice them, they have jobs and tasks and they do them and she simply goes on with the things she does around their quick efficiency to set her world to rights or keep it running when she’s come home for holiday.

 

The first words she really says to him are: “How’s your grandfather?”

 

He’s standing in the ditch with a shovel and she’s sitting next to her dead dog and it seems like an inappropriate question to have just asked. She hopes old Aemon isn’t dead.

 

It’s not as if she would know, she’s hardly ever around.

 

She knows his name is Jon and she knows she’s seen him before, a little boy and a teenager visiting his grandfather but she doesn’t think she’s ever heard his voice, the gruff scratch of it when it answers her, “He’s fine. Just old.”

 

“That’s good.” Her voice is toneless.

 

They bury her dog and she’s already cried but standing under the tree next to groundkeeper’s grandson makes her feel sad again.

 

“Thank you.”

 

“You’re welcome.”

 

She stands under the tree for a long time, looking at the dirt, her white jeans are a mess and the shovel lies next to the turned over earth. He’s forgotten it.

 

* * *

 

 

They sit around the table, digesting and slowly finishing what’s on their plates, her mother sips at her wine and Bran readjusts his wheelchair with little nimbleness, the armrests bump against the table edge and makes the glasses shudder. No one takes notice.

 

Sansa catches the on and off grin on Bran’s face, each time Robb tries to take a drink the table shakes. Bran catches her looking, she smiles and pretends not to notice him being a bother.

 

Her father asks about Lady.

 

Her mother cuts in before she can answer, “We’ll have to have something planted for her.”

 

Sansa feels the gravel in her gut, Summer sleeps at the other end of the room and Greywind is by the front hall, she lets a smile rise and settles all false across her mouth when she tells her mother, “That’d be nice.”

 

Her father swallows a final bite. “I’ll mention it to Aemon tomorrow.”

 

She says, “Jon dug the grave for her. I don’t think Mister Aemon has been feeling well.” Her mother’s eyes widen and her father tries to ignore the way her mother is looking at him. “Jon?”

 

“He’s been helping Aemon.”

 

Sansa can hear the gruff carefulness in her father’s voice.

 

Robb doesn’t help with adding, “He’s home from school for a while.”

 

Her mother’s face pinches before she rises silently. Her father excuses himself with a forced smile. They’ve left the table to have a disagreement, a quiet one where no one wins, one where they only reaffirm their own point of view. Sansa’s never seen the point.

 

Robb ignores the obvious and asks, “How’s school?”

 

“I’m on holiday.”

 

“No, that other thing you’re here for.”

 

Bran bumps the table again and this time Robb’s look is acidic, “I’ll stab you with a fork you do that again.”

 

“Wouldn’t feel it anyway.” Bran pulls a face and Robb scowls. Bran looks at her, “What _are_ you here for anyway?”

 

“Summer study, we sit and talk and go through all the interactions people have when they talk to each other. We examine the patterned behavior.”

 

Bran blows out air from his puffed cheeks, “That sounds awful.”

 

Robb nudges him.

 

He steals Robb’s beer and Sansa pushes hers to him when Rob takes it back. Bran rolls away too fast for Robb to confiscate the new one. Sansa shrugs off the dirty look Robb gives her.

 

They sit abandoned at the table, the maid won’t come in to clear the table until they’ve all finished.

 

“Can’t believe Jon’s back.” Robb says.

 

Sansa props her chin on her fist and stares at where her parents left the room. “Mum doesn’t like him.”

 

Robb rolls his eyes. “She thinks he should have tried to keep Bran out of that tree.”

 

“Why’d she let him work then?”

 

“Dad didn’t tell her I guess.”

 

“How’s Bran?” She worries about her brother. Arya and Rickon are securely sequestered away at boarding school and Bran’s been lonely she knows.

 

Robb’s grin is half a leer, he tilts back on his chair legs to make sure Bran is not sitting in the hall having a listen, when the chair settles back down he leans over the table and his grin gets conspiratorially smaller, “Better, since the weekend nurse came on. She’s cute.”

 

“Florence Nightingale effect.”

 

“He’s _fucking_ moony, San.”

 

Sansa extends her father’s left behind wine glass, “cheers.”

 

Robb swings his beer into hers.

 

* * *

 

 

He been stacking rocks in a ring to make a garden fixture, his sweater is a black hill of wool on the grass. He holds a rock with both hands and straightens when he takes notice of how she walks to him.

 

The scarf hangs half folded from her hand, “I made you something.”

 

He puts down the rock gently and reaches for the scarf, it’s black, she’s had her mother teach her a new stitch for it.

 

“Yeah?”

 

“Figured it was your color. I know it’s still too warm for it but, yeah winter is always coming right?”

 

“Thanks. Yeah.” He says as she’s turns and waves her hand jauntily above her head, her long hair sways and he stares.

 

* * *

 

 

 

She reads through the course-book and stops at ‘reaction formation’, she knows all about it already. She acts the opposite way to how she is feeling. It’s a defense mechanism that almost always works in her favor, it garners sympathy from strangers, it brings her drinks, it helps her ignore the obvious.

 

From her sprawl across the bed, course-book abandoned on the floor, she hears her parents leave in the car. The gravel rattles as they go down the long drive.

 

As careful as her mother tries she can’t hide the letters in the post from the doctor’s office or the times on the calendar for appointments with no names.

 

Her father always looks sad and her mother always looks like there’s something she would like to say.

 

Sansa feel sick over it, she rises from her sprawl and sets up her vanity, a spread of make-up tubes and lush colors, she’ll go out and smile, have a good time.

 

* * *

 

 

The pub is loud, it usually is. She comes back from the washroom and Robb is already standing next to the table full of locals he’d rather have come with. She’s already been forgotten by the look of surprise when she comes up next to him and nudges his shin with the toe of her trainer.

 

“Hey.”

 

“San, hey! You weren’t here when these guys started up together.” Robb says, merry and almost drunk, as if she should know who his friends are.

 

At the wall end of the bench Jon Snow leans in and eyes her. The boy with big cheeks across from him, “You’re Jon’s cousin, Robb’s sister, nice to meet you. I’m Sam.” His hand reaches across the table, cold and a little damp from his pint glass.

 

Robb grins, looks proud and very inebriated. “Yeah, Sansa. Meet: “The Wall.”

 

“‘ _The Wall_?’” Her brows pinch together, “Pink Floyd cover band?”

 

The big man with the bigger beard hits the table with his fist and points a finger across the table at Jon and Ed before they can answer her. “It’s a great feckin’ name.” The expression on Jon’s face shows his disagreement. Sam tilts his head and looks askance, “I told you people would say that. What?”

 

Ed pulls from his beer bottle. “ _The Watchers_ was choice.” He looks up at Sansa, flushed and nervous even though his tone is steady, his eyes don’t know where to look, they flick down over her chest sparingly, practically an accident. “Don’t mind Tormund, he just big and loud.”

                                               

Tormund scoffs, “‘ _The Watchers’_ Watchin’ what?”

 

“Well it’s more the action I think. I still think ‘The Watchers _On_ The Wall’ was the best.” Sam says, Ed nods.

 

Jon smiles. “Too many words Sam.”

 

Tormund agrees with an, “aye” and Ed nods a second time. Sam looks vaguely offended.

 

“They’re all better than the wildlings,” Ed says

 

Tormund slaps the table again, “What the fuck you say?”

 

Jon taps Ed so he can be let out, to Robb he says, “Tormund always picks shit names.”

 

“I ain’t fucking deaf, I can hear you.” Tormund yells out after him.

 

She excuses herself while Robb loiters at the table, the night drags.

* * *

*There’s an email in her inbox she has gone outside to avoid clicking on. She smokes one of Robb’s menthol fags and tries to find some ease of nerves, there isn’t any. Her stomach turns.

 

A pillar of light from a torch passes over her shoes.

 

Jon walks across the damp grass of the back garden, she points and smiles, “Night watch, huh?” He only stops and stares as if he hasn’t caught her words. She finally asks, “What?”

 

The pensive look on his face makes the family resemblance stand out. “Nothing, just a thought, _The Night’s Watch_ , good name. For the band.” She nods, “Yeah, it is actually. Better than _The Wall_.”

 

“It’s late.”

 

She’s standing outside alone in the dark and she gives him the almost true answer, “Mum might not appreciate the fags.”

 

“Got another?”

 

“Sure, yeah. I thought you were down at the pub, the lights were off.”

 

“There’s a hammock, I’ve been sleeping outside, it’s warm enough now.”

 

“Too hot, now.” She complains, imagines him lying out between two trees sweating in his shorts.

 

“Can’t beat the view”

 

She chokes on her inhale, looks to him. He’s staring up at the stars, she thought he meant her for a moment. It’s nice that he didn’t, she’s used to the falseness boys speak as well as their names some days.

 

* * *

 

 

They smoke outside the pub and she’s near enough to drunk that she’s lost a certain amount of the gentle tact her mother always impressed upon her and tells him, “Ramsay is a brute.”

 

Jon Snow takes a drag off his unfiltered fag, “Is he?”

 

She nods heavily, “Yes.”

 

“Another rumor?”

 

She takes a pull off her beer, “Like the ones about him setting those hounds on trespassers?”

 

“Well, that’s not really a rumor.” He tells her, he’s grinning.

 

She watches Ramsay Bolton press his companion against glass of a storefront across road, she can hear the girlish cackle and the whisper of words she cannot make out.

 

It’s too far for her and Jon Snow to be heard or seen in enough light to be noticed. “We dated, then I had to go back to Uni and I suppose he found Myranda.”

 

“Jealous.” He sounds chuffed at the idea.

 

“Some people bring out the best in you, others the worst. It’s all subjective though, isn’t it?”

 

“‘pose so.” The conversation seems to have made him uncomfortable, tetchy, his shoulders have pulled up and his arms are tight against his sides, she finds that she wants to prod at the parts of him she leaves stung by her honest confessions, there’s fun in it. Teasing him.

 

Across the road, there are no more words, Ramsay and Myranda swing close and lope down the row of storefronts, sometimes stopping to hold the other’s mouth with theirs or slip hands high and low, under clothes and over flesh.

 

“The brute thing was sort of exciting at first. I liked it. Just,”

 

She hears Jon breathe, the barely there of it while he stands close and looks like he’s holding his breath.

 

“It’s different when you realize that they _really_ just like to hurt things.”

 

She finishes her beer and goes inside. Jon Snow does not follow. She does not see him again for three days.

 

* * *

 

 

The pond is a little muddy and it smells green but the water is mostly clear and she comes home soused after a night at the pub with Alys and Jeyne. Three pints of dark stout and a swim seems brilliant, the best idea she’s ever had so late.

 

If it is brilliant she decides to make it a ritual, every night until Winter with all her drunk solemnity, she half trips out of her denims and trainers, she leaves everything else on the grass on top of them and sloshes into the pond.

 

It hasn’t reached her chest since she was twelve and grew too tall.

 

There’s a brief flash of a torch up on the garden path, it winks out and she knows it isn’t Aemon in the dark of the rhododendrons.

 

She’d seen Ghost trekking across the back lawns.

 

She wonders if he’s holding a hand over the beam of the torch, watching her. She splashes and stares up at the stars on their field of black.

 

He can watch if he likes, she likes to be looked at. She’s not so ashamed of being vain that she’ll lie to herself.

 

* * *

 

 

Her honesty is what the truth might be if she didn’t lie about how it made her feel.

 

* * *

 

 

Aemon dies in his bed from a spring cough he never complained of and told Jon Snow was nothing.

 

Jon sits in the garden shed where he used to smoke up with her brother before he was told it might be best if he wasn’t around in the summers after Bran’s fall. He’d felt like shit that last time he drank alone in it, he’d cried then but he just feels bone deep tired this time.

 

A tall shadow falls across the floor, all leg and when he looks up with a bottle hanging between loose fingers her face has a statue’s expression. “I’m sorry about your grandfather.” She looks good, impossibly put together in her stark blacks and severe hair-do.

 

“He was my great uncle really.” His mouth is dry, nothing feels quite real. Old men die. It’s something he’s always known but never expected.

 

Her heels click across the wooden floor, the bench creaks under their shared weight when she sits down next to him. “Is there a difference?”

 

“Not really.”

 

He passes her the whiskey bottle and she sips at it, delicate, like it’s not the cheapest bottle they had down in town. He watches her throat move and his mouth goes dryer still, he looks away but her legs are long and bare under her skirt and he shuts his eyes, it’s the only safe thing he can do.

 

“Want company?”

 

“I’m not really in the mood to talk much.”

 

The bench creaks, she moves to leave he thinks until he opens his eyes at the touch of her hand over the back of his head, nails running across his scalp through his curls and the other holding onto his shoulder, it curls over the back of his neck and he sets the bottle down.

 

He breathes with an open mouth over where her shirt front is buttoned over her navel, lower than that, his hands crawl up the hem of her skirt and she doesn’t stop him, she sways closer and the front of her thighs are cool under his too hot hands.

 

“We don’t need to talk, do we?” She asks before she lets go of him to reach up under her skirt and pull down her knickers, she kicks out of her heels and steps out of her delicates. She settles on top of him with knees pressing into the bench.

 

“Guess not.” He pulls apart her sensible severe hair-do first and then her shirt. He gets his mouth on her tits, perfect mouthfuls of pale and pink and she breathes like she’s had it punched out of her.

 

She works him out of his slacks with less ease than he’d expect from a girl like her. He can’t decide if to tell her that would be an insult or a compliment, he presses his mouth to her skin, bites and suck and kisses and doesn’t care if there are marks she’ll have to hide from her mother.

 

She rocks against him, toes kneading into the bench and his hips and the dips below his spine, he swells between her thighs and wonders how much more before he bursts, it’s been awhile.

 

His pants are shifted down and her thighs open wider and then her hand is on him and then he’s in her and she’s filled up and he can’t breathe either.

 

He fucks up into her, hard and she doesn’t complain, he might wipe his eyes against her shoulder or the fall of her hair but she doesn’t mind.

 

“I didn’t use anything.” He says, the shock like cold water.

 

“I am.” Her smile is gentle and too sweet to fucking him in the garden shed after a funeral service, but she’s a mess of unlike things and he holds her by the arse and braces his heels into the floor.

 

He’s finished after a few too hard pumps and slips from her. She whines, just once, against his retreat. He jostles her on his thigh and she pulls back to look at him while she rubs off across him, it makes his cock throb in final spasms against her hip and her half-shut eyes are hooks caught in his bones.

 

He bounces her and words get lost in her throat. Her cunt is slickness and heat over his thigh, canting up against the rise of his hip and his breath stutter like hers. Her mouth is open of his shoulder when she finds relief.

 

Their sweat cools sticky. And she moves first, efficient and fast she dresses and he’s left with his cock soft and in the open, her slick on his skin, he pushes himself back into his slacks and she smiles, gently, again “Feel better?”

 

The sweetness of her voice makes him angry, the day should be silent and mean, it should not be summer and kindness. “Should I?”

 

She slips back into her shoes and says, “a little, maybe.” Her look is pensive though, innocent in that maybe she was wrong, maybe he should still feel bad, it takes the wind out of his sails.

 

“Yeah. Thanks.” I does not sound anything like gratefulness but she doesn’t even scowl.

 

“No problem.”

 

She’s gone and he can still smell her perfume in the room, he can still smell _her_ on his skin, his shoulder aches where she pressed teeth into it, just a moment of cruelty mixed into her tenderness.

 

* * *

 

 

 

It’s a week later that he drops down from the garden wall behind her as she walks along in long green frock and white sandals. They haven’t talked since the funeral and its left him chafed, wounded even, she’d gotten under her skin. He’d let her.

 

“Why did you let me fuck you in the gardening shed if you were just going to pretend you didn’t after?” He asks the question loud enough that she should shush him despite no one else being around.

 

“I’m not pretending anything.”

 

“You are.”

           

She steps close enough that he might reach out and drag her against him.

 

“I like you and I felt bad seeing you like that, I thought maybe you’d stop being so sad all the time if someone was nice to you instead of treating you like everything is your fault, it isn’t.”

 

He bristles at her pity. “You fuck everyone just to prove how _nice_ you are? The perfect daughter, the pretty one, the one off at Uni who only runs home when things get hard.”

 

“My professor only let me in the program because he wanted my parents’ endowment and then told me how much I reminded him of my mother. Old friend she knew before she met my uncle Brandon, I guess they’d got together after he died.” She waits, thoughtful, goes on, “Guess she still picked my dad in the end. That’s why I’m home from Uni. And I fucked you in the gardening shed because I wanted too and because you’ve been looking at me since I came home and I like the way you look at me.”

 

He has no answer, she turns and walks away from him and leave him feeling as if he’s been struck by lightning.

 

* * *

 

 

Harry’s at the pub with his mates. He says hello and asks if he can buy her a pint. He shows her pictures on his mobile of Saffron’s little girl and asks what a good gift for a toddler is.

 

Night’s Watch plays it set and Sansa keeps her back to Jon Snow the entire time.

 

* * *

 

 

Bran has squared his jaw very sternly in the middle of their half empty breakfast table. Everyone’s home again and no one is around for long. Arya is running down the lane with Gendry, her mother is napping upstairs and Rickon is out next to the lake turning himself and Shaggydog into absolute messes.

 

Bran says, “I want a new nurse.”

 

Their father puts his lifted mug back down onto the table. “I thought you liked Meera.”

 

Robb smirks over his sausage. “He does.”

 

Bran scowls aside at Robb and nods. “I do.” Her father looks between her brothers as if there’s some secret between them, there is. She collects the finished plates.

 

“Meera can’t say yes to Bran taking her out if she’s his nurse.” She says.

 

“She can’t?” Her father asks, infinitely amused. Bran pushes his spoon through his cereal forlornly when he answers, “No.”

 

“Seems a bit like prostitution.” Robb gets in before Bran jabs between his ribs with a milky spoon, “Shove off!”

 

Their father looks at them both as sternly as he can manage, “Robb.”

 

“I like Meera.” She says.

 

Her father nods, leans in his chair and thinks for a short moment before he says to Bran, “You should have another nurse, you’re still growing.”

 

Robb snorts, “That’s right he’s growing.”

 

Sansa kicks at her brother’s ankles and Bran flicks cereal at him.

 

* * *

 

 

She walks around the edges of the woods side of the property. Robb cuts across the lawn and falls into step with her. His hands are fists inside his jacket pockets. “Mum is sick.”

 

Sansa reaches down for a stick and hits leaves off low branches, “Yeah, she is.”

 

“You know?” Robb’s surprise makes her feel guilty. She shrugs. “She didn’t tell me either. I just figured it out.”

 

“I don’t know what to do San.”

 

“We can’t do anything anyway.”

 

He stops walking and she keeps going.

 

* * *

 

 

After the pub he finds her, “I had a girl, she died. It was awful shite and things haven’t felt right since.”

 

He doesn’t say more, one day he might.

 

“I didn’t just come home because of the thing at Uni, my mum’s dying. She doesn’t want any of us to know.”

 

“I’m sorry.”

 

Sansa nods. He does look sorry, it’s nice that he means it instead of simply paying her the lip service.

 

“Bran and Meera know and it feels like we’re all just waiting. People don’t act like themselves when they wait for something, I think.”

 

“I shouldn’t have been such a prick.”

 

“No, you shouldn’t have. Not about the shag anyway.” She grins.

 

Finally his cracked expression breaks and he laughs.

 

* * *

 

 

When her mother dies it’s her sister that finds her.

 

Sansa doesn’t cry until she is alone in her mother’s room much later surrounding by her things.

 

It’s all just relics now and a shrine for remorse.

 

* * *

 

 

The shed will be too cold, they both know that.

 

His cabin is small and tidy except for the basket of folded clothes he hasn’t put into drawers and the mug in the sink from morning tea, there are some crumbs on the table but it’s neater than she’d expected.

 

She unwinds her scarf and he pulls his up over his head, his curls are a mess and both their cheeks are ruddy. He undresses himself down to his shorts and goes down on his knees to reach up under her dress for the elastic waist of her hose and knickers, her toes curl against the cold wood boards of the cottage once she’s pulled her feet free.

 

His hands push up the hem of her dress and his mouth follows. His tongue slips up her slit laving her with heat, she holds his curls and swallows a gasp, she presses her lips together and whines silently to the white washed ceiling.

 

His eyes are sly and his mouth is plush like a girl’s. She can see her slick trailing in spider light strands on his mouth when he settles back on his heels.

 

When he takes her to bed he fucks her so tenderly all she wants is to cry and come.

 

Not half past the hour after they’ve come back to themselves, skins damp and bodies wrung out from grief and something that half crosses the distance between lust and their separate lives, there’s a knock on his door.

 

It’s soft and quiet.

 

They dress half-way and he answers it.

 

She can hear Robb say from outside. “Tell Sansa we’ve all gone back to the house.”

 

* * *

 

 

Her father sits at her mother’s vanity, quiet and lost.

 

Her brothers are piled together on Robb’s bed, they stare at the ceiling.

 

Robb drinks in his rolled up shirt cuffs, Rickon cries messy child tears in his rumpled suit, Bran barely breathes in his unmatched sweat shirt and pants.

 

Arya sits in the crowd of the sitting room, Uncle Brynden puts a hand on her shoulder as he passes. Uncle Edmure stares between shoes and looks uncomfortable. Uncle Benjen looks pale and stoic greeting guests at the door.

 

Sansa lets Gendry in through the kitchen and tells him to wait, Arya sneaks out into the garden with him and tells her _thank you_. She makes tea and greets the guests herself.

 

* * *

 

 

“My mum’s dead.”

 

“It sucks.”

 

“It really bloody does.” Robb cries, Jon gets it, he slides over his pint.

 

Jon doesn’t know if Robb wants a pat or hug but he’s never wanted one himself when he’s wrecked so he doesn’t do anything.

 

Robb laughs wetly, sucks back tears and snot and laughs again, “And _you’re_ shagging my _sister_.”

 

Jon wonders if he’s going to be punched, if he should say it was something they only did twice. He doesn’t know if that makes it better or worse.

 

“How long?”

 

“What?”

 

“How long have you been shagging my sister?”

 

“It’s not quite like that, we just…do you really want to hear this? We’re more like friends, maybe. I don’t really get it either, I never thought of your sister before, but now, it’s just different. We aren’t just shagging but we aren’t really together in the first place.”

 

“Alright.”

 

“She’s strange, your sister. But, I like her.”

 

Robb snorts wetly into his pint, looks up under his brow at him and sighs heavily, full of drunken dramatics, “It is strange, that. You fancy my sister.” Robb pauses and gathers his thoughts as carefully as the snacks set out on the pub table, “My sister fancies you, bloody fecking strange is _right_.”

 

* * *

 

 

She stands outside his cottage door and tells him: “I’ll be back between terms.”

 

She tells him in her coat with her duffel at her feet.

 

Sansa Stark tells, never asks. She’s going.

 

He reaches for the hat on the coat rack next to the door. “Here, I didn’t make it, Sam’s girlfriend Gilly does, but I thought it’d look nice.”

 

She puts in on over her bright hair and when she kisses him her lips are cold but her hands are warm when they slip up under his jumper.

 

“I _am_ coming back.”

 

And she does, in spring like the flowers.

**Author's Note:**

> I was going to include Jon's whole backstory but I think it would make for a better fic on it's own so I might do a companion piece to this but more Jon centric.


End file.
